[ale] OT: I mean way OT like DocX OT

[Robert Reese]

Hello Scott,

Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 4:03:20 PM, you wrote:

> Had my first encounter with M$ DocX file. My son got the latest and 
> greatest(?), (Ok the not so great, okay okay,the latest and worstest) 
> M$Office. He sent us a document that he had created in it. My wife was
> unable to open it on her State office issued laptop that has M$ WinXP 
> w/M$Office 2003. 
> ...
> Told him to resave the doc in an older format, before
> sending it to anyone else.


Two things to offer:

1: Recommend RTF (Rich Text Format) as his default output for most things that need to be edited by others unless he's 110% certain the person to whom he sends the file has MS Office 2007.

2: Remind him that Word, Excel, etc. are EDITORS and not readers. (Now if I can get the other 99% of the world's users to understand that AND to understand email isn't for sending files, I'd be halfway to Nirvana.)

If he does not want someone editing the file (it occurs to very few people that someone might edit *their* document) then to send it in a non-editable format, preferably in PDF; there are now so many free PDF creation softwares that not being able to send a PDF is something that can be quickly and readily remedied.

A further benefit of PDF is that the vast majority of operating systems can handle it with little formatting issue and diminished font issues (if the fonts are embedded, that is).

Cheers,
Robert~

P.S., There's a PDF creator built right into OpenOffice 3.x!  Send him a copy on a CD. ;cD